labingi

via umadoshi

Your main fandom of the year?
Mirage of Blaze again! This amazing BL light novel series has been resurrected in English language fandom after its substantial death from dwindling translations around 2012. Now the series has been summarized in detail up to the end! Almost as good as translated. And this year I discovered that they’ve been doing stage plays since 2014, and the stage plays are awesome. If you love angsty boys love, check it out!

Your favorite film watched this year?
The Last Jedi. It is, indeed, not perfect but it has given renewed charge to my Star Wars fandom and imagination, quite a bit more than The Force Awakens did, though I enjoyed it too. This is the first time in a long time I’ve actually wanted to check out Star Wars books.

Honorable mentions: Logan and Wonder Woman. (Wonder Woman is a very important, very well done film, but Logan meant more to me emotionally.)( Read more... )

Jumping into Day 11 with apologies for not doing the whole thing in order. I just don't have time to do the whole thing properly.

Day 11
In your own space, talk about a creator. Show us why you think they are amazing. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I think this means fan creator? I want to extol several.

The amazing astrogirl2 is the one who introduced me to LJ-style fandom in 2004. I came across her site somehow in searching for Blake's 7 fandom and was captivated by the wonderful community (doing B7 and Farscape RPGs at the time). Astrogirl herself--still posting regularly on LJ and still with quite a following--has always been such an intelligent, balanced, caring, engaged fandom presence, as well as a dashed good fan fic writer. (Alas, we are no longer in the same fandoms, but my admiration remains.)

Apart from Astrogirl, I want to use this space to praise some of the amazing people who have brought Mirage of Blaze fandom into English because I have been revisiting Mirage with much enthusiasm lately.

One of the first Mirage fans I ever encountered was petronia, first on her website, later through LJ. I long considered her--and pretty much still consider her--a celebrity I am rather shy about talking to. As far as Mirage goes, it does not get better than her humorous summaries. Across the years, I find I would usually rather read her account of Kotarou being mistaken for [Spoiler] than read the original. She captures very much the tone of Mirage itself when it self-satirizes with just a nance more meta and comedy. Utterly delightful.

The most professional-like of the many wonderful people who have taken a stab at translating the 40 volume epic of Mirage is Asphodel. Check out her amazing site of Mirage and other translations, complete with giant glossary and numerous hyperlinked footnotes. She is still at it! She has been at it for ten years or more now. The going is slow. (This is not her day job.) But the product she posts is always exceptional.

Also an excellent and voluminous translator is quaint_twilight. She is no longer active on LJ or DW, which I totally understand but makes me sad. I miss her wonderful translations and her enthusiastic fan presence, and I applaud her for keeping her account active so that we can continue to access the fruits of all her hard work on Mirage.

Other folks who have put in many long hours of translating work include 99me, tasha_poisonous, and demitas, as well as many others who have translated some wonderful bits in English and other languages--and round about 10 years ago, a whole host of people doing amazing multi-page meta. I can't name everyone, but I appreciate it all.

As for traditionally published creators, hands down the most influential in my life over the past eight-ish years or so is Yasuhiro Nightow. I must admit, I don't really relate to his latest work, Kekkai Sensen (3B), but both of his two major earlier works, Trigun and Gungrave, have been not only big fandoms of mine but have transformed my life. Each has been a means of profound revelation about myself, my patterns, and how I can better address my life. I am extremely grateful for that. It's a rare and precious gift.

Fandom Exes Meme--via oaktree89

I haven't done one of these in a while; I wonder how much my answers have changed.( Read more... )

28 – Have you ever collaborated with anyone else, whether writing together, or having an artist work on a piece about your fic?

I bloody wish I could get an illustrator for my original fiction. I did get one picture once--of Dáromur--quite a good one, but that was years ago and the project didn't get finished. I have collaborated with louderandlouder on fic, mainly in the realm of heavily sharing ideas for one or the other's fic. But we did have parallel fics going for a Death Note--Bodyverse/Banana Fish crossover. The DN part, which was far and away the greater endeavor, is on indefinite hiatus now. The BF part is posted on my DW/LJ and AO3.


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26 – What is the oddest (or funnest) thing you've had to research for a fic?

I don't like research in general. This is part of why my original fic is science fantasy set in a universe I don't have to reality check with current or historical facts, also part of why I didn't want to become a tenure track professor. But I have found recently that writing in X-Men fandom requires a heck of a lot of research on topics as diverse as paraplegic sex, the Holocaust, when the word "nerd" came into common usage, and almost 50 years of X-Men comics canon. It actually has made for quite an educational experience. The oddest thing I've researched for a fic (though not fun) is probably the Holocaust--odd because fan fiction seems a trivial window into it. But it is where it is. (The funnest thing I research is probably etymologies of names.)

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24 – Betaing – How many betas do you like to use to make sure there aren't any major flaws in your fic? Do you have a Beta horror story or dream story?

My history with betas reflects my history with fan fic in general: it's gotten a lot more casual over the years. When I first started posting fic around 2004, I got everything betaed, big fics sometimes by more than one. Today, I rarely put forth the effort and patience to recruit a beta before posting, unless I'm writing in an area I know I'm not competent to field alone, the most typical example being the British idiom. To that end, I usually go to vilakins's door today, and she is very obliging and helpful.

One effect of not getting stories betaed anymore is that I almost always have typos because I'm not a very good proofreader. As for quality, I think it depends on the story. Sometimes I can put out a decent quality story on my own (in my own estimation). Sometimes my stories fall flat, and I'm sure a beta would have been helpful.

I do still sometimes get major works betaed. louderandlouder and sixish did some lovely beta work for my on my giant Banana Fish fic a few months back.

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22 – Have you ever participated in a fest or a Big Bang? If so, write about your favorite experience in relation to one. If not, are there any you've thought about doing? And if not, why not?

Rarely. When I was new to LJ (around '04), one of my first activities was a Blake's 7 ficathon, which introduced me to a lot of my early LJ friends. I subsequently did a Farscape ficathon and a couple of smaller ones. I enjoy these, but given all the irons in my fire, they almost always get cut from consideration. Often, the fan fic I'm personally inspired to do--when I have time to write at all--takes time from my original fic to the point that my original output is almost nil. I enjoy doing challenges and writing to prompts, but the fic and original writing closest to my heart comes first, and there's rarely additional writing time.

My favorite experience is probably the B7 ficathon because it was new and exciting, and I got to meet lots of new B7 fans.

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20 – Do you ever get bunnied from other people's stories or art in the same fandom?

"Getting bunnied" sounds like something awful that would happen to Anya in Buffy. In any case, sure, this has happened a lot with Death Note. I got a lot of initial inspiration from serria and subsequently had a great deal of cross-pollination with louderandlouder. I'm currently getting a lot of this from X-Men fandom because it is being so prolific right now. It's hard not to absorb bits of emerging fanon and play with them. I don't think it's ever happened for me as a direct result of artwork.

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via andraste. Like her, I can't resist, despite being over-memed.

Give me a pairing [I might have some thoughts about] and I will tell you:

1. What they most commonly do during sex
2. Who has prettier hair
3. What they argue about most often
4. Who'd cope best if the other one died
5. The happiest plausible happily-ever-after I can think of for them.

16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?

I kind of hate them. Summaries are one of the reasons I'm a very poor candidate for success in traditional publishing, where a vast amount of making it out of the slush pile is dependent on writing a nicely enthralling, self-propagandizing summary of your brilliant novel. I don't sell myself well that way. Some native sense of propriety says it's a cheap trick to sum up the "brilliant" highlights of your own work.

Thus, regardless of the actual tone of the story, my summaries tend to be brief and functional and often a bit ironic. There are exceptions: I summarized my Charles/Erik fic as "young and in love," which is probably strongly correlated to why it's gotten a lot of hits. But it's more usual to get summaries like my Erik/Raven fic: "Forty years together, and it does seem a day too much." (This is for a fic that's actually quite serious and angsty.) All in all, my summaries probably lose me more readers than they gain. But I do get a laugh out of some of them. I don't know how I come up with them...

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